Neandertals ‘must have had advanced skills’

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are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and
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A ‘complex quadrilateral artificial structure’ consisting of specially arranged pieces of stalactite and stalagmite was found in a cave in southern France. A piece of burned bear bone was ‘dated’ by the radiocarbon method as being ‘at least’ 47,000 years old. Both the bone and the structure show unmistakable evidence of human involvement.1

The problem for evolutionists is two-fold: that far back in their scheme, Neandertals were the only inhabitants of Europe (the oldest ‘dating’ for European cave paintings is 31,000 years). Moreover, the structure was found in a deep underground location, hundreds of metres from the cave entrance, and in total darkness. That means that whoever built the structure ‘would have needed to use fire, torches, lamps, some sort of portable light’. In addition, the structure is so complex that the builders would have had to communicate with each other.

Such language skill and technological know-how easily fits the creationist understanding of Neandertals as a line of early post-Flood humans, but evolutionists, despite recognizing them as anatomically human, have long held to the belief that Neandertals could not possibly have been able to do such things.

One continually seems to hear of such surprises for evolutionists. For instance, farming and baking bread was thought to have taken place at the earliest around ‘19,000 years’ ago on the evolutionists’ time scale, but a recent Australian find shows that technology to grind grain has now been dated at ‘30,000 years’. However, not surprisingly for the biblical model, the identical type of equipment was being used when the first European contact was made.2 Dates of more than 40,000 years have been assigned to stone tools with held traces of a glue used to attach them to wooden handles by heating bitumen, which is far too sophisticated for the usual idea of ‘stone age’ technology.3

References

Science, Vol. 271, p. 449, 21 January 1996.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 1996.

The Times (London), p. 14, 1 April 1996.

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